Broadcasting

Threads

The closest you'll ever want to come to nuclear war.

'THREADS' - a shockingly realistic account of global nuclear war and its horrific aftermath. It's a normal Thursday in Sheffield when East and West stumble into war and Britain is devastated by 200 megatons of nuclear explosives...

This chilling film tells the story of a nuclear strike on Britain. Through the eyes of two families, we witness the immediate after effects of the attack - the shock, grief, radiation sickness, hypothermia and starvation. In the months that follow, hideous injuries remain untreated, looters are shot on sight, food supplies run out and many die in the intense cold of the nuclear winter.

Thirteen years on reveals a depopulated Britain living below subsistence level - a devastated economy where money has no value, crops fail through lack of pesticides, no fuel and machinery, and a brutalised post war generation grows up stunted mentally, physically and emotionally.

The fragile fibres that hold society together - the threads - have been completely destroyed and there is no outside aid. The end of the world as we know it...

Credits

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In 1984, around the time of Threads's conception, Duncan's journalistic specialisms - intelligence, surveillance and the military, were hot topics in the public mind. Nuclear war was a real and perpetual threat. Duncan developed the tidea with blag blah. The BBC blah blah. Showed the true horror that lay behind every headline and newreport, and brought the apocalyptic nightmare into Britain's homes. It is as poingant and terifying now as it ever was.